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>> April 19, 2008

Ok so I purchased our tickets yesterday on SWA, they released our dates in the fall. I jumped on it and purchased our tickets. I made 2 mistakes with regards to our plane tickets, although both were fixed. First, I learned that you may only use 4 different payment methods to make a purchase, so 4 gift certificates, but not 4 gift certificates and a credit card. This caused a slight panic at first, because my $250 in gift cards didn't cover our tickets and I had to use our credit card for $28. In order to use it, I had to "remove" one of my gift cards, I called SWA and they actually were unhelpful. However, our conversation gave me a great idea, I just purchased our tickets separately. I was able to purchase my ticket with 3 gift cards and peter's ticket with the remaining gift card balances and the credit card. Since we were purchasing 2 tickets, that was an easy solution, I could have also purchased each way separately since the ticket price didn't change when buying it that way. I NOW KNOW to purchase only $100 gift cards and not to mess around with the $50 ones.

So I purchased our tickets $278 total- $250 gift cards = $28 on our credit card (this is how much I budgeted for our trip).

Second lesson... CHECK DING!!! Since the dates were just released, there was a DING special for 15% off the fall fares. So I could have avoided using my credit card entirely! I was able to "fix it" by cancelling our original reservations and rebooking using the coupon code. However, there are no refunds, so we ended up with ~$36 in SWA credit on our original tickets. So bummer that I could have saved cash on this trip and had cheaper tickets, but at least I still "HAVE" those funds to use on our next trip.

Ok. New update, $50 to add to our total. I have sold some Huggies Swimmers on Craigslist. We are now over halfway towards our goal!